Battlefield Hardline servers are run and operated by the community. EA has nothing to do with the servers on PC. The minimum players needed to start a game I believe can be changed by the server owners, this was possible in Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4.
That’s right, the servers are rented officially from EA — there are 0 servers in this game. On these servers, there’s a setting in the config: vars.roundStartPlayerCount 1, and the value 1=4 can’t be changed. There’s a loophole with vars.roundRestartPlayerCount, but I still can’t verify it — finding 4 players during the day is a real nightmare. EA has put this in the server code for a long time and can change it on their server build, which they have full access to, and not just hosts that they host at their facilities and rent out, they can't globally change something in it, but we tenants have neutered settings.
So theoretically they can do it, but practically I don't think they will do it. With an unfortunate achievement, the issue cannot be resolved (
